Thursday, June 8, 2017

I'm in bed with a crappy cold. The thing slowing me down ancillary to the crappy cold is the mashed potatoes in my skull where sometimes there is brain matter. I used to think about death all the time. Used to: until about a month ago.

Now that I'm am older (about a month so) than I was in my meditations-on-death years, the conjecture, fear, and eager anticipation don't interest me. Money does. Je suis broke. Paying the rent so I am not made homeless interests me.

Sick and stumbling I dragged myself to the library a few hours ago, thinking I'm Not Your Negro, the 2016 film about James Baldwin, was on hold for me, but it wasn't. And because two librarians investigated, each loudly, and obliviously insensitive to my sensibilities, I kept repeating, "It's about James Baldwin," every time one of them repeated the title, I'm Not Your Negro. Because if you didn't know what the film was about, a decent person might wonder about me.

I have to start over and put the film on order at the NYPL. That's okay. The mashed potatoes that constitute 90 percent of my intellect cry out for butter and gravy. I cry out to passed over James Baldwin, now with the Messengers, for help, mashing the potatoes into respect and income.

Monday, June 5, 2017

On June 7th, the Disagreement Presents: "If you have really good vision..."

Starting a little later than normal (9pm) but blazing you with three fantastic writers:

MATT DOJNY SARAH SARAI EMILY TEMPLE

Emily Temple has an MFA from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoynes fellow and the recipient of a Henfield Prize. Her work has recently appeared in Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Fairy Tale Review, No Tokens, Territory and elsewhere. She is an associate editor at Literary Hub and lives in Brooklyn.

Sarah Sarai writes poetry and short fiction. Poetry collections are: Geographies of Soul and Taffeta and The Future Is Happy; poems in: Barrow Street, Boston Review, Prelude, etc. Short stories in: Cleaver, Fairy Tale Review, Callisto, etc. and a chapbook, The Young Orator. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.

Matt Dojny’s debut novel, The Festival of Earthly Delights, was published by Dzanc Books in June 2012 and is now available in paperback. Dojny’s work has appeared in Electric Literature, A Public Space, The Collagist, Better Magazine, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. Visit him at mattdojny.com, or at hiphopisthefuture.com, where he (sometimes) posts a drawing a day.

Sunday, June 4, 2017

Spencer Dew is impressive. His review in decomP magazinE of my collection Geographies of Soul and Taffeta is no doubt the least of his accomplishments but in my life, the most important. His summations are the very “wry” he assigns me, and brilliantly so. I will let you read the review for yourself, and hope you will buy and read the book, as well. See below for links. Here is a taste of both book and review. One poem in the collection, “Rolling on the Floor Killing Elves,” begins with an apparition of discord:

Spencer Dew sees the poem's link to the other poems in the book - so gratifying to the poet - when he sums up by use of a few of my lines thusly:

“It doesn't take brains, this thing called happiness,” but that doesn't make it any less elusive in a world of distractions, represented here by forks in mattresses, the underserved fame of snake, and the need to kill various elves. “When Trouble farts, you can smell it,” Sarai writes.

“...the need to kill various elves.” Who among us has not known that?

Read the review, in decomP magazineE.Buy Geographies, published by Indolent Books.Check out Spencer Dew, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Centenary College of Louisiana, currently researching the Moorish Science Temple of American, and author of Songs of Insurgency; Here Is How It Happens; Learning for Revolution: The Work of Kathy Acker; and other books.